The Last Good Day (21 page)

“Fine, then we’re all one happy family.” Mike gave him a small scar of a smile. “Let’s go catch the bad guy.”

He saw Harold fidget and shift in his seat, deciding whether to bury the tension or have it all out at once.

He looked over at Paco, as if this was his new battery partner, and seemed to take the signal to take the easy way for now.

“So, what’s in the bag?” He turned his attention to the hazmat bag Mike was still holding.

“Forget it.” Mike opened the door to walk out. “Nothing important.”

19

LISTENING TO NPR
on the way back from Jeanine’s that morning, Lynn heard the attorney general say more terrorist attacks were a virtual certainty, though he couldn’t say when or where. She turned it off quickly as she pulled into the driveway, noticing the mailbox leaning a little to the left, as if the post had been pulled out and then shoved back in haphazardly. Dead yellow leaves crunched under her wheels, and a falling acorn ricocheted off her hood, the trees following autumn’s usual narrative even as the sun ignored it. When she got out of the car, she saw that the plastic owl that was supposed to drive the crows away had fallen off the roof, and the gardeners had left a pile of pulled weeds by the garage.

She stood there for a moment, promising herself not to fall into a deep depression again. She’d already been down that route after her mother died last year. But right after her book group broke up, her mind went back into a tailspin. Someone pretending to be human had done this to her friend. Someone who went to the supermarket and probably filled his car with gas a couple of times a week. Someone whom she might have nodded to at a stoplight. Someone who might have sat near her at town meetings and watched her children cross the street. The thought choked and bulged inside her head, threatening to burst like an artery.

Breaking the paralysis, she went through the gate and out to the studio in the backyard, determined to stay busy and focused.

The studio stood white-shingled and cool in the shade of a leaning cedar. Her private sanctuary with a working bathroom. Part of the deal when they bought this house was that she’d finally get real work space instead of having to furtively develop her pictures in the bathtub like some amateur pornographer. So they’d spent more than twelve thousand dollars to convert the old toolshed, installing a fully equipped darkroom, bathroom plumbing, an iMac with a state-of-the-art scanner, and a comfortable outer office with cool Scandinavian-style furniture. A window cut into the wall offered a tantalizing glimpse of the river down the hill. Stepping into this quiet zone five days a week had allowed her to reclaim a bit of her life from the children. But now she felt isolated and hollow, wishing she could just pick up the phone and call her mother or Sandi.

She unlocked the studio and flipped on the lights, still feeling vaguely bothered by what Jeanine had said.
She was very competitive with you. That’s what
you
never got about her.

Could that be right? She prided herself on being the girl who never looked away. Even on the fifth-grade school bus, she’d make herself stare at the squashed squirrels on the road while the other girls were shrieking and the boys were making retching sounds. She was the girl who’d always climb the extra flight of stairs in the tenement to get the shot all the other photographers had missed. Now somebody was telling her she couldn’t even see her best friend clearly.

She turned her attention to the coffee-colored file cabinets next to her tilted drawing table, thinking this couldn’t be entirely true. Maybe there’d been more competition than she’d ever really acknowledged, but Sandi was in her corner. She’d been the first friend to say she liked Lynn’s pictures. And she certainly wouldn’t have wanted Lynn moping around the studio, gnawing on the butt end of a throwaway conversation. Get on with it. She’d meant to go through more of her old shots anyway for the retrospective, but she had put off looking through some of the files, knowing they were as jumbled and disorganized as her memories. She pulled out a drawer and got a faceful of dust motes. Blowing them aside, she picked up an old envelope, and a series of red-tinted negatives fell out like peeled-off scabs.

She turned on the halogen light and started examining the individual frames, realizing that these were the first pictures she took with the Kodak Brownie her father gave her on her seventh birthday. An off-kilter image of her mother’s rosebush. Hampton, the beagle, moving toward his water dish in a blur. And then the impossible, a perfect family portrait of Mom, Dad, and her baby sister, Carol, standing in front of the old house on Birch Lane, all the elements falling into place for one fleeting second. Mom before the MS, in her white-ribbed turtleneck, looking a little like Natalie Wood, with dark hair cresting on top of her head. Seeing it again brought back that old ache. Mom at least twelve years younger than Lynn was now, still slightly stunned to find herself back in the ’burbs, her bohemian painter years living with three other waitresses in a cold-water flat on Perry Street far behind her. Still thinking she was going to have more than half a life. Dad looking rakishly handsome in a Brooks Brothers shirt, with his initials monogrammed over the right breast, not yet staring off into the distance and contemplating divorce. Carol standing between them, shading her eyes, as if she was already shrinking from her parents and thinking of moving to a hippie commune in Oregon.

Looking at the shot reminded Lynn that like autumn leaves and Billie Holiday’s voice, families were sometimes at their most achingly beautiful right before they fell apart. She remembered the warmth that flooded through her when that picture came back from the Fotomat and Mom and Dad stood on either side of her, quietly murmuring that, yes, she really did have
an eye.

A year later, Mom took her to the Museum of Modern Art for the first time, to see the photo collection. She could picture herself standing before Diane Arbus’s
Masked Woman in a Wheelchair,
transfixed, as Mom—not yet wheelchair-bound herself—explained that this was how this artist looked at the world. “And the things she saw made her want to kill herself,” Mom said. “Can you imagine?”

Looking back, Lynn realized that that was the first nudge. The second was Mom giving her the old Roloflex a year later, as if she was handing over a baton. She held a different negative up to the light and saw that it was a series of later pictures. Mom alone at the kitchen table in the midseventies.
The Energy Crisis.
The “first presenting symptom,” as the doctor called it, was a change in her perception of the color red. Mom noticing that a crimson line she’d drawn seemed to twang like a guitar string on paper. Then came the gradual loss of sensation—the inability to feel silk, sand, her husband’s touch. Eventually, she couldn’t even feel her own feet, making it almost impossible for her to walk. Not that Mom ever liked to dwell outwardly on the subtractions. She was happier talking about the new vibrancy of her vermilion strokes.

Lynn put the magnifying glass over the image and saw the blank easel in the background next to the old Amana refrigerator, where Mom tried to do some sketching before the tremors got too bad. A red pencil was on the floor, having rolled off the edge of the table. The fallen baton. Mom was too weak to pick it up. So it stayed there for almost five hours until Lynn came home. A hot wave of shame washed over her as she remembered Mom insisting she take the picture because it was a good image.
Mom, lemme help you; really, I don’t mind. Really. It’s okay, Mom. Don’t cry. I don’t mind cleaning up. I don’t mind helping you in the bath. I don’t mind cutting your food for you.
The daily tug-of-war between guilt and obligation. Life getting smaller and smaller. Until the day Lynn found what looked like a rough draft of a suicide note in the desk drawer and confronted Mom with it in the bathroom.
WHAT
IS
THIS?
And Mom, naked and abashed on the rim of the tub, looked up at the ceiling and said,
Your father’s right. One of us has to have a life.

Somehow, at that moment, Mom had made up her mind that she was going to go on. She’d forced herself back into the world, bit by bit, first taking on the kitchen, then getting back in the car, then navigating the A&P aisles. Trying to make that vibrating red into a stronger bloodline, as if she could will herself into remission. She’d staggered into Lynn’s first high school exhibit, anarchy on a black cane, determined to see at least one of her daughters finish the race for her. Even as a teenager, Lynn understood that the only real way to honor her was just to keep going.

A knock at the studio door jarred her into the present.

“Who is it?” she called out.

Maybe it was the Dryer Man or the mythic Tree Guy, finally arriving to trim the maple branches that were threatening to break the bedroom windows. She hated it when contractors and landscapers showed up unannounced weeks after their supposed appointments.

“Hello. It’s me,” she heard Michael Fallon say.

Something in his voice made her think of the second drink of the night, the one where the novelty wears off and the potential for trouble begins.

She opened the door. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“That was another song on the jukebox at the Copperhead.” He stepped in. “‘Hello It’s Me.’ Remember that?”

“What’s up?” She pursed her lips.

“Just a couple of follow-up questions.” He moved past her and looked around. “Hey, this is nice too. How much did it run you?”

“Michael, I’m a little busy. Is this about Sandi?”

“Of course.
Why else would I be here?
”

He put his face up close to a picture on the wall. A family portrait she’d taken of Barry and the kids at dusk in Yosemite, the sky dimming like a hand was over the sun and the mountains cloaked in black velvet behind them.

“You know, when I was down on the pile, at Ground Zero, there were a lot of photographers around,” he said quietly. “You had all these guys in emergency gear, still trying to see if they could save lives. All these firefighters finding body parts and cops’ guns going off in the heat. But then there were all these parasites with Nikons. I remember I saw a fireman’s arm under a pile of rubble, and I was trying to get somebody to come help me move it. And then I turn around and this bitch sets off a flash right in my face. I swear, I almost punched her.”

“She was probably just trying to do her job.”

“Sure she was.”

He put his face even closer to the picture, as if he was trying to smell the chemicals through the glass. She remembered how this part of him had gradually started to unnerve her when they were going out. That eerie stillness he had, an almost animal alertness.

“I hear you called Harold this morning,” he said.

“I realized I had some information that might be useful after I left the house yesterday.”

“Yeah, but you called
Harold.
Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know. What difference does it make? You’re all working together, aren’t you?”

He adjusted the frame on the wall, even though it had been hanging perfectly. “So why didn’t you tell
me?
You saw me when you were leaving the house.”

“I don’t know. I guess it took me awhile to realize that’s what it could be.”

“And what other information have you been holding out on?” He turned slowly, his eyelids drawn and darkened as if he’d been sitting in front of a fire for a long time. “Or am I supposed to get that from Harold too?”

“
Michael.
”

“Whatever you think of me personally,” he said, “I am still the one working this case.”

“I understand that.”

“Then why can’t I get a straight answer out of you? She was supposed to be your best friend.”

She noticed a tiny blue mark at the bottom of his shirt’s breast pocket.

“Do you have any leads?” she said.

“That shouldn’t concern you right now. What should concern you is giving me the answers I’m looking for.”

The blue mark darkened before her eyes. His pen had sprung a tiny leak.

“It’s not like I’ve been deliberately holding anything back,” she said, trying not to stare at it. “It’s just that I was in such a state of shock yesterday that I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“You thinking more clearly today?”

“I guess.” She shrugged.

“Okay. Let’s get on with it. What can you tell me about the marriage?”

“I don’t know.” She leaned against a file cabinet. “Not all that much more than I knew yesterday. They’d been under a lot of stress financially because of Jeff’s business. But you could see that just walking around their house.”

“What else?” he said brusquely.

The dot was gradually expanding, the indigo-blue ink finding its way along the network of white cotton seams.

“It could be there was somebody else who got between them.”

“You saying you heard she was seeing someone?”

She nodded, wondering why he’d automatically assumed it was the woman at fault.

“And who are you hearing this from?” His eyebrows gathered.

“Do I really have to tell you?” she asked, reluctant to drag Jeanine into this.

“This is a homicide investigation.”

She nodded, seeing the point but still not wanting him to hear all the secrets of their tribe.

“I just saw Jeanine Pollack at my book group.”

“Okay. And what else did she say? Did she know who the guy was?”

“No. She just knew Jeff had been depressed and maybe Sandi was looking for a way to give him a little zap.”

“Figures,” he said, a corner of his mouth turning down.

“What makes you say that?”

“A woman gets a man to pull the plow for her. And as soon as he comes up lame, she goes looking for another stud.”

“I think that’s maybe a little simplistic,” she said.

“Is it?”

The blue eyes regarded her warily, as if challenging her to one of those old staring contests they used to have.
Whoever looks away first loses.
People used to say they got together because they were both like owls, hardly ever blinking. She dropped her eyes and saw the indigo stain had grown to the size of a dime below the pocket.